Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette

By A. Robert Lee

'Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette' seeks to give expression in poem and metaphor to the United States as a personally lived and engaged with culture. The span, accordingly, involves both site and journey, a roster of art, people, different authorships, film, music, photography, cities, society. Prose sketches both serious and antic as well as verse. American Studies with a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Aug 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9788491341673

Book preview

ARS GEOGRAPHICA: MAPS AND COMPASSES

Going Galápagos

i

Three

Quito

sea-lions

stretched

like

Ecuadorean

pashas

along

the

dockside bench.

Equator

gate-keepers

of

Pacific

ease

and

loll.

Whiskered

docents

of

fin, beak, claw and shell

carapace and wing

sea and island

Beagle and Acushnet

sight and word

and

all of them

yawning.

Quito

via

runway Guayaquil.

Quito

of

La Plaza Grande

La Catedral

El Mercado de Otavalo

Quito

of

Hidalgo Gothic

be-hatted mestizaje

a hundred shoeshine boys

Quito

of

thin oxygen

and

Andean volcano hills

Quito

of

Earth’s closeness

to the sun

Quito

of

street pobreza

and

JW Marriott Five-Star Hotel

Avenida Orellana y Avenida Amazonas

ii

Quito to La Mitad del Mundo

actually

250 meters

off centre

Pyramid

of

latitude and longitude

GPS-confirmed Museo Inti-Nan

actually

the centre

of

earth’s

curvature

earth’s

hemispheres

earth’s

lobes

Near, though

iii

Thank you

Incas

everywhere

Thank you

Ecuador’s

mestizos

criollos

quechuas

Chirrera, Jama Coaque, Tolita, Machalilla, Valdivia

Thank you

Lago Titicaca

Manco Capac

Machu Picchu

memory quipus

Merci

Charles Marie de Condamine

rubber, quinine, metrics, circumference

Gracias

Juan Montalvo’s Las Cantilinarias

thoughts, views, language

Gracias

Jorge Icaza Coronel’s Huasipungo

novel, history, memory

iv

Quito zodiac

to cruise ship

isle for isle

turtle-journey

to

Las Galápagos

Islas de Colón

Archipiélago de Colón

Islas de las Galápagos

vertical arrow diving frigates

at home blue-footed boobies

herons on one foot watching

at home huge gulping pelicans

swallow tailed gulls on sentinel duty

Darwin’s finches

(one upon my shoe)

neck coupled albatrosses

un-flighted cormorants among the crabs

sedate breaststroke lagoon turtles

night time spectral prowler sharks

rock-hopping diver penguins

clambering, clod

heroic monument tortoises

iguanas land and marine

in their thermometer bodies

of mottle-leather skin

and

un-dinner table sneezing salt

and amid these origins of species,

across ranger white-marked trails

across silver forests

across black roped lava

across 500-species of shrub and plant

across volcano pools

ascend

rock formations

serrated cliff-faces

weather and wind chiseled ledges

whorls, folds, wrinkles

high cathedral vaults of Nature

playfields of pottered cinder

stilled spurts of fire-stream

messaged pebble, boulder, stone

live thesaurus petrification

vocabularies of Spain fade –

San Cristóbal, Santa Cruz, Baltran, Isabela

and other Encantadas

vocabularies of England fade –

buccaneer Ambrose Cowley

Darwin Research Station

Lonesome George

vocabularies of Melville and Vonnegut fade

page and paragraph

vocabularies of cruise and tour fade

guide and guidebook

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s evolutionary design

earth’s sea-risen island

epic

of

magma, basalt, crust, littoral?

is not this, first, finally, un-faded

earth’s delivery room?

American Visa

Are you now, have you ever been, a nudist?

Hardly the question I had in mind

at 1965 Grosvenor Square London

visa-seeking for The New Republic.

Self-fantasy had me the trouble-maker,

the commie, the un-American,

youth politico CIA/FBI target.

Why, surely, those

debutant Tribune reviews in the shadow of

Orwell and Foot?

Why, surely, those slivers of student Left-ism,

a war-march or two,

a smidgeon of Marx or Trotsky?

But a nudist?

For all my dubious Ban the Bomb shouts

or half-believed Clause 4 English politics

or America the Bad clatter

or Vietnam as chancre attitude

or VOTE LABOUR, Holy Loch, and End The War placards

or just as equally

my secret sharer

attraction to

the America of

Kennedy Camelot hope

Ginsberg and Dylan lyric

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane

Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch

Manhattan and San Francisco

King Civil Rights and Malcolm Black Power

LBJ and Voter bills,

did it all just come down to

nakedness?

OK, you’re all set

in all-American

signature phrase

said the wholly pleasant

case officer.

Set to go, stamped passport visa, enjoy your stay.

Scholar resident

like a hundred arriving others.

Euston Square to Times Square

for sure.

This new Londoner’s theatre-curtain of importance

duly lowered,

on and into high Atlantic

treading the

Queen Elizabeth

Southampton

to New York time

and Fulbright America.

Was my best banner

simply to have kept my clothes on,

kept my pink-Brit flesh wrapped?

Had I saved America

or myself,

or the both of us

from exposure?

New York Magic Mountain

Sailing into New York Harbor

past verdigris-statued Liberty

was I not latest Columbus,

if lower deck passenger

then still

the Drake or Raleigh?

Hardly, had my stomach been first to say.

Anxious to match the Atlantic

my reading was

Mann’s Mountain

but where Castorp and Joachim fevered towards death

I had just turned merely pale,

billow queasy.

Land balance

lay in Manhattan’s

grid of everywhere peopled

squares and blocks and heights

the human multi-Broadway

of uptown downtown

Bowery to Yonkers

Village to Central Park

Big Apple city health

Yes Philadelphia

Yes to the Lenape

Yes to Penn and Franklin

Yes to Independence’s cracked bell

Yes to Rittenhouse Square

Yes to Chesnutt Street’s ivied Penn

Yes to Market Street

Yes to the Inquirer

Yes to the Schuylkill, river and expressway

Yes to 30th Street Train Station

Yes to the Art Museum – Duchamp and Rocky

Yes to the Main Line, Welsh Bryn Mawr, Italian Paoli

Yes to Marian Anderson’s contralto

Yes to the pages of David Bradley and Lorene Cary

Yes to W. Wilson Goode’s mayorship

Yes to each middle-Philadelphia Row House

Yes

also

to

the

Germantown

food

sign

I

saw

in 1972

Anglo-Saxon Pizzas (since 1957)

Chicago L

Hog winter Chicago

South Halsted freeze-up

Wind-chill

Lake Michigan

February

Broken L train

high on CTA track-curve

yet

sub-zero’d

into

break-down

Skyline driver-carriage

frozen

into

four-square mirror

ice-block

city

transport

cube

and

cubist

tableau

How not to summon Sandburg winter stockyards?

How not to re-see black Projects, boxed human damp and chill?

How not to re-walk cold Irish, Polish, Bohemian sidewalks?

How not to board at speed Green and Red Lines –

King Drive, Ashland/East 63rd, Halsted, 90th Dan Ryan?

How not to earn spring thaw Chicago?

How not to ride un-iced Chicago, train and carriage?

How not to warm with hot-humid summer Chicago?

How not to un-hog Chicago, South and North Halsted?

How not to outdoor-people Chicago, all Chicago,

the busy tickets of human heat from cold of the L city?

Charlottesville Juleps

Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia

Monticello and University

Serpentine Walls

Pavilion grandeur

Palladio in the Blue Ridge.

The genius of the Declaration

and, well,

Sally Hemings.

Ah those First Families of Virginia

those Lees of Virginia

Frances Lightfoot Lee

Lighthorse Harry Lee

and always Robert E. Lee

The Confederacy’s own

The Glorious Cause

The Lost Cause.

What, then, from an Atlantic away

to almost inherit that name?

What to confess a mother

who knew Robert E.

only as a racehorse name

and so passed my way

quite another kind of

cavalier heritage?

What, then,